Not just any building: why plans for the M&S flagship store hit a raw nerve
Margaret Thatcher was effusive as she admired a £200 cashmere sweater. “That’s lovely. Now that is what I call an investment,” she remarked. The then prime minister was visiting Marks & Spencer’s newly extended store at Marble Arch in 1987 as shoppers readied for Christmas. Thatcher was flanked by Lord Rayner, the retailer’s chairman, as she spent almost two hours touring the store, meeting staff, greeting customers and choosing a few items.
More than three decades later, relations between the high street stalwart and the current Conservative regime are far less cordial, as a row over the same shop on London’s Oxford Street threatens to become a cause célèbre in the battle over the shape of redevelopments and the fate of Britain’s high streets.
This week Michael Gove, the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, ordered a public inquiry into the plan to demolish and rebuild the flagship store on the most famous of Britain’s high streets.
Campaigners argue the project would release 40,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, while M&S says that government intervention into its “significant investment in one of our most iconic shopping locations” could have “a chilling effect for regeneration programmes across the country”.
Sacha Berendji, the M&S property director, pointed to Oxford Street’s struggles to fill empty shops as big retailers have stepped away, saying Gove “appears to prefer a proliferation of stores hawking counterfeit goods to a gold-standard retail-led regeneration of the nation’s favourite high street”.
M&S has refurbished other stores – such as Cheltenham and Chelmsford – but says rejigging the existing Marble Arch shop, created over decades from a merger of three no longer suitable
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